We talked this afternoon with Nicholas Boggs, author of the new biography Baldwin: A Love Story, which looks at James Baldwin’s life beginning with the person, rather than the politics, revealing how Baldwin’s relationships were critical to shaping his work, his understanding of America, and the way he saw himself.
Baldwin wrote that “Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up,” and that’s what Boggs captures in this new book — the process by which Baldwin learned to love himself, and how his experiences of love, friendship, and exile were key elements of the insider-outsider perspective he brought to his fiction and essays, and to his critiques of America that resonate even more strongly today.
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